Finger Lickin' Fifteen (Stephanie Plum 15)

“I guess you could say that to Morelli, too,” Joyce said.

Lula cut her eyes to me. “You want me to shoo

t her? ’Cause I’d really like to do that. I still got a few bullets left in my gun.”

“Thanks, but not today,” I said to Lula. “Some other time.”

“Just let me know when.”

“So what are you doing here in the slums?” I asked her.

“Ask Connie.”

“Vinnie hired her again,” Connie said. “He decided you weren’t bringing the skips in fast enough, so he brought Joyce in to take up the slack.”

“I don’t take up slack,” Joyce said. “I take the cream off the top.”

From time to time, Joyce had worked for Vinnie, mostly because she was good with a whip and once in a while Vinnie felt like a very bad boy.

“What’s in the casserole?” Joyce asked.

I opened the lid. “It’s barbecue. Grandma Mazur made it for me for dinner. She knows how I love this recipe.”

Joyce spit on the pulled pork. “Just like old times,” she said. “Remember when I used to spit on your lunch in school?”

“How about now?” Lula asked. “Can I shoot her now?”

“No!”

Joyce took the casserole dish from me. “Yum,” she said. “Dinner.” And then she sashayed out of the bonds office, got into her black Mercedes, and roared off down the street with the barbecue.

“I got a dilemma here now,” Lula said. “I don’t know whether I want her to like my barbecue sauce or get the squirts from it.”

Vinnie stuck his head out of his office. “Where is she? Did she leave? Christ, she scares the crap out of me. Still, there’s no getting around it. She’s a man-eater. She’ll clean up the list.”

Connie and Lula and I did a collective eye roll because Joyce had tried her hand at bounty hunting before and the only man she ate was Vinnie.

“Am I fired?” I asked Vinnie.

“No. You’re the B team.”

“You can’t have an A team and a B team going after the same skips. It doesn’t work.”

“Make it work,” Vinnie said.

“We should have saved the barbecue for Vinnie,” I said to Lula.

“Wasn’t me that gave Barnhardt the barbecue,” Lula said. “I wanted to shoot her.”

I hiked my bag onto my shoulder. “I’m out of here. I’m going to see if Myron Kaplan is home.”

“I’m with you,” Lula said. “I’m not staying here with this Barnhardt-hiring idiot.”

“What about the filing?” Vinnie yelled at Lula. “There’s stacks of files everywhere.”

“File my ass,” Lula said.

ACCORDING TO THE information Connie had given me, Myron Kaplan was seventy-eight years old, lived alone, was a retired pharmacist, and two months ago, he robbed his dentist at gunpoint. Myron’s booking photo was mostly nose. Several other photos taken when bail was written showed Myron to be slightly stooped, with sparse, wild gray hair.